20 Random Facts About Demelza C Robins
by Thanfiction
Summary: Part of the Daydverse 20 Random Facts series. Spoilers for the entire 'verse.


**1. She was NOT named after the Poldark series. **

Demelza is actually the name of a small hamlet in St. Wenn, just east of Newquay, where she grew up. Her parents were trying to find a name that would be unique without sounding cutesy and trendy, and her mother spotted it on a piece of mail, from which it beat out the similarly derived Rosenannon. It wasn't until after Demmy was born that they started getting asked about the books and the BBC series, by which time it was rather too late. Her parents did read them, out of sheer curiosity...well, the first two. They just couldn't slog through more than that. Anwen was far more carefully researched.

**2. She has always had a complicated relationship with her hair. **

Though Demmy could always pass for white better than her sister (they're 1/8 Pakistani, 5/8 white, and 1/4 black if you want to get technical about it, though she usually just says "mixed race" if anyone asks), she likes to joke that her hair expresses all possible racial tensions she could subconsciously have. Silky-fine and deepest brown, it is a fickle beast with a mind of its own that can be anything from a massive cloud of hopeless frizz to a cascade of gorgeous corkscrew ringlets to anything in between. This has no bearing, notably, on what she _wants _it to do, and it has been the source of both countless tears and strangers stopping her in the street to tell her it's lovely. She tried cutting it short when she was eight, but quickly learned that this was worse than any of the other options, so she usually just wears it pulled back or braided unless she has time to enter unto battle with a proper armory of serums, gels, brushes, and possibly even a flat iron if she's feeling exceptionally bold.

**3. She is a massive fan of Morgan Le Fay.**

When she was five, she had a picture book of famous witches, and Morgan was painted with the ruins of Tintagel in the background. To young Demmy, this made her the only one who connected to a world she immediately recognized, and when combined with the most beautiful robes in the book and surrounded by _fairies, _there could be no one more intriguing. This plunged her headlong into the myths - and a fairy phase - but although the fascination with romanticized pixies quickly faded with age, the interest in the character only deepened. From the goddess Modron to an incestuous, traitorous temptress of baroque-era retellings to a neo-pagan feminist symbol to potential historical figures to witches who worked under her name, Demmy can talk your ear off about how she has served as a barometer for the cultural opinion on both witchcraft and womanhood. If she really gets going, she'll even show you the tattoo that runs all the way up her left side from her hip to just below her breasts.

**4. She loves to surf. **

Her father was born in South Africa near Muizenberg, and chose Newquay when he moved to the UK explicitly for the surfing. She was riding on his shoulders before she could talk, and got her own little board for her fourth birthday. Family holidays read like a reference guide to the world's best surfing destinations, and though none of them were even remotely competitive level, they were still really good by most standards, and she credits it unquestionably for her exceptional sense of balance. Despite moving to London for work, she still goes to the seaside every chance she gets, and counts it as a success all things considered that she has taught her husband to at least manage to stand up on a board most of the time if the waves aren't too intense. The sound of waves is the most soothing thing she can imagine, and she uses it to sleep when she's struggling with night terrors.

**5. She has a scar on the back of her shoulder from a human bite.**

It had been her fault completely. She was six years old, Anwen was four, and she had been tickle-torturing the younger girl out of sheer boredom until she finally got a set of razor-sharp baby teeth well past the point of drawing blood for her efforts. Knowing she'd done wrong in the first place and afraid of getting in trouble, she'd covered it up and hidden it, but the desperate childish magic that had stopped the bleeding hadn't addressed the amount of bacteria in a human mouth, and it hadn't been discovered until after she was already in hospital for systemic sepsis, a fever of 40C, and with her kidneys on the verge of shutdown. They told the Healers to leave the scar to remind her of the lesson they wanted her to learn; asking for help will never get you in as much trouble as trying to deal with the problem yourself. Considering the DA, she questions the effectiveness of this strategy.

**6. She adores dogs, the bigger the better. **

They had between three and six when she was a child, and she can never quite settle herself with the idea of anything smaller than a cocker spaniel even counting as a dog. Dogs, she thinks, should be able to chase a ball past the breakers and knock you over when they bring it back, drag you across the floor with your arms around their neck, handle hugs as hard as you can give them, make thunka thunka whap noises with their tail against the wall when they're excited, serve as full body pillows for naps and be _there _when you're sobbing into their side with handfuls of fur. Right now, they have four; Gawain (an Akita/Rottweiler mix), Gaheris (a Mastiffish mutt), Gareth (a Great Pyrenees), and Agravain (an Alsatian rescued from washing out of police training), and they're considering a three-legged St. Bernard that she fell in love with when she made the mistake of volunteering at the RSPCA.

**7. She has almost no sense of rhythm.**

Rowan got her started on really strongly rhythm-driven music to work out to when they were training for the DA because she was actually hurting herself by not being able to establish a rhythm and flow to some of the repetitive exercises. She's not sure what causes it, but unless something is externally imposing it - in which case she can follow along (sort of) - she's utterly hopeless at keeping anything like a beat, something that almost caused her to fail CPR. Colin used to tease her that at least she'd be safe if she ever found herself "on Arrakis". Three years later, she found out what that meant and would have given almost anything to be able to smack him upside the head, kiss him, and smack him again.

**8. She started playing Quidditch as a favor to Ginny. **

Their class schedules coincided, and Ginny wanted to try out for team captain in a season or two, so she asked if she could practice coaching technique by teaching Demmy the game practically from scratch. Her surf skills quickly proved valuable for riding a broom, with many of the same tricks of balance and core strength coming into play, and by the following year, she actually managed to snag a spot on the team. It was a lot of fun, though she sometimes felt guilty for not taking it nearly as seriously as most of the other players. She couldn't even _name _three pro Quidditch teams, much less have some kind of blood-oath devotion to one of them, though she kind of favored the Falmouth Falcons just because, well...Cornwall.

**9. She changed her mind about Colin after Christmas. **

She'd assumed she knew him. Hell, everyone had. He wasn't exactly one of the lower-profile members of her year, with his constant chatter about stuff that most of the other Muggle-Borns didn't even get and cramming six weird references into every three sentences, taking pictures of everything, and of course, Harry Potter Harry Potter HarryPotterharrypotterharrymotherfuckingPOTTER all. The. Damned. Time. You sort of learned to tune him out, not that he'd noticed. Except maybe she'd tuned him out a little too much. Because somewhere in there, the potterchatter had stopped, the pictures were actually kind of gorgeous if you let him show them to you, and while sure, some of the references didn't make much sense, he could also do things with words that could set your heart on fire and make you want to grab your wand and charge hell itself. Then Christmas happened, and he came back with a cold, white hand he couldn't feel and held himself differently and when word started getting out about what he'd done for his brother, the last of the assumptions went out the proverbial window. That was also when she noticed that he'd apparently gotten really, really cute while she wasn't looking. And wasn't gay after all.

**10. She managed to convince the Carrows that she was the Secret Keeper just before she ran to the RoR.**

Colin had to stay behind. He was underage, she wasn't sure if the RoR would even let him in the way things were by then, but more importantly, they both understood that with Neville and the rest of the Senior Staff gone, he was the strongest natural leader the DA had left outside of their Drill Sergeants. Which was exactly what she was afraid of. Snape had to know they were using a Fidelius or something like it, and Colin was already in too much of the Death Eater's spotlight...if they started paying even _more _attention now that he was no longer going to be in the shadow of the older students, it could all come undone. She couldn't tell him that, of course, not ahead of time. He'd have tried to stop her. But while the Fidelius prevented her from saying anything _real _about the DA, it didn't keep her from lying, and Anwen, bless her, was brave enough (and she strongly suspected had enough of a crush on Colin's little brother Dennis) that she was willing to join in the ruse with a conversation strategically placed for Alecto to "overhear." Once that worked and she was dragged in for interrogation, of course, things got...more difficult.

**11. She owes her life to her sister.**

She was following Steve's orders, trying to render the basement and dungeon levels impassible. Break the steam pipes, set fires, flood things, bring down pillars, whatever she had to do to keep the Death Eaters from being able to cross beneath them and pop up anywhere like Colin and the kids had done. Exhausted, wounded, half-blind, bleeding, she was focusing everything on trying to cause enough damage and still maybe getting out alive. She didn't even hear him. Or her. The Death Eater who had followed her down - or maybe been there already. The sister who had been trying to find her, pursuing rumors and "have you seen" and ignoring orders for fear and hope and _DEMMY DEMMY DEMMY WATCH OUT! _She ducked just in time, but it still wouldn't have been enough. Anwen attacked. Killed him while she was scrabbling for her wand in the shadows. Saved Demmy's life at such a price. Such a price. The cease fire didn't come soon enough. Real care didn't come soon enough. There wasn't enough she could do, not down in the darkness, not down in the ankle-deep water, not down in the steam and shadows with so much blood and her hands full of things that should have stayed inside and oh God baby your arm stay with me stay with me just hang in there stay with me. She didn't hang in there. She didn't stay. Demmy was still begging her anyway when she carried her to the long row of also too late.

**12. She hid from the world after the battle. **

For almost a year, she did not leave the house. She barely left her room. There were a few appointments for her eye. She skipped them after the first two. There was one appointment with a therapist. Then she skipped those. No one could make her go. No one could make her anything. Trying was a bad idea. Talking to her was a bad idea. Startling her or touching her on her blind side or flashing any kind of light or making any kind of banging noise at night was a very, very bad idea. Screaming, roaring, cursing, hexing, breaking things, basically subhuman kind of bad idea. Lightning storms...yeah. Even her parents just let her get pass-out-cold drunk for those. Otherwise, she just stayed in her room. On her bed. In her pajamas or naked. Staring at the ceiling or crying or curled up with the dogs or crying or staring at nothing or crying or eating things that came in packets or crying or nothing at all and somehow days and longer went by in those nothing places. Then it was time for her sister's _how the fuck has it been a year _memorial service and when she tried to suck it up and make herself presentable, somehow this filthy, pasty creature had appeared in her mirror with a sunken, shriveled hole in its face and a huge matted nest of hair that had lost two teeth and gained forty pounds and looked utterly mad. She did not go to the memorial. She didn't want Annie to see her like that. She shivered and panicked her way through the scathing bright Out There to the therapist's office instead, where she fell on her knees and would have given anything for a dog to hide in as she made a sobbing something noise that thank everything they understood meant _help me. Help me please. _

**13. She started in medicine with the DA. **

Corner had chosen her to replace Ginny as the assistant medic-type person from Gryffindor, joining Li and Ryan to learn healing spells and basic first aid techniques for what they thought they'd encounter on the battlefield. He'd said she had a good aptitude and apologized a lot for rushing her, but she didn't think it would have mattered. They'd never prepared for what actually happened, for the degree the Death Eaters were fighting to maim, for the shrapnel and the collapses and the falls and the beasts that took as many as the spells. After staggering back to the world of the living, she'd decided to pursue Healing again because it was viciously hard, because it held her attention and pushed her limits and offered no space to climb back to the dark place. And because there was a part of her begging and bargaining that maybe next time, if she knew what she was doing...

**14. She was recruited to the Aurors after saying no three times. **

Officially, she was certified as a Mediwitch in June, 2003, shortly after the debacle in Ireland. She could have chosen to pursue a Healer's license next, but something about kneeling in a clearing with her thumb in her former Lieutenant's left ventricle and barking orders to save his life and _it really working and_ _him surviving _made the nice position at St. Mungos less appealing somehow than the red robes of the quick response team. That was the first time Harry asked her. Shacklebolt already had - along with the other of-age survivors - five years prior. She'd told Shacklebolt to break his wand in half and fuck himself with it. She was a little nicer to Harry. The second time Harry asked was a year later, after she'd saved Zach's life on a case gone wrong. The third time he offered salary and a half because of her extra qualifications and begged please, he just wanted to have a medic in the department in case. So that no one would die waiting for help. That time she said yes.

**15. She lost touch with Artie Chambers for almost seven years before they met again and started dating.**

Maybe that was for the best. Looking back, you can tell someone in ways that even if they get it, it's not so bad. She can tell him about the depression and the year in her room. He can tell her about the paranoia and the superstition and the obsessive little rituals and being sent to apprentice with his uncle in the hopes he'd stop hurting himself. They can see the scars, but it's still better, maybe, to have shared the thing they survived and now share being survivors without having had to share the ugly surviving part in between. Instead, she met him proud in Auror Green with a red cross and he'd met her strong and confident in long sleeves when he came to fit the department for new sparkback-resistant holsters, and they'd stared at each other like giddy fools when the names clicked until he'd blurted "coffee?" and she'd said "sure!"

**16. She has three ocular prostheses, but almost always wears an eyepatch at work. **

There's one that's blank and a little bit softer than the others; that one's just for keeping the socket filled so that it doesn't start to collapse or tighten, and she wears it around the house or anywhere that appearances don't matter, because the flat, blatantly artificial off-white really bothers people who aren't used to it. It's also the one she favors for work, though she usually wears a patch there as well, in both cases the intent being to make sure that no one forgets at a potentially critical moment that she has a blind side. There's one that's "glass" but really a kind of resin, carefully custom made with exquisite detail all the way down to individual veins painted between the layers of resin so they seem embedded. It's less comfortable (and was very expensive) but the illusion is almost flawless, and it's the one she wears when she doesn't want people to know. The third is also resin, but it's done with real gold leaf, and it's the eye she wears when she cosplays Morgan.

**17. She was underwhelmed by the demands of motherhood.**

Pregnancy was easy for her, and she knows she's lucky in that respect, no matter how much she'd joked about her hips over the years. She worked up until a week before giving birth, but she still feels guilty that despite the generous maternity leave offered, she wanted to go back less than six weeks later...and _did _at eight weeks. It wasn't a matter of loving or bonding - and oh, she is _not _amused by anyone who suggests post-partum depression as if she didn't know exactly what depression felt like fuckyouverymuch - just very easy going and healthy babies and a loathing of sitting around with time on her hands that was fostered years before a dark, reeking bedroom piled in empty food packets and dog hair. It's the main reason she doesn't talk about her kids much at work; she feels guilty that overall, at least so far, and with the help of a husband whose workshop is in the garage, they've turned out to be less trouble than the dogs.

**18. She is deeply suspicious of anything that contains visible vegetables. **

Yes, she knows they're good for her. Yes, she eats them. Yes, the right number of servings. She's medically trained, after all, and she's got an example to set at home for that matter. That doesn't mean she has to like it. Left to her own devices, she'd be perfectly happy for all consumables to fall into the four primary food groups: Beer, chocolate, meat, and fried. With a possible side category for things-that-go-with-meat like bread and cheese. Salads are just a fucking conspiracy to make grown adults eat lawn clippings, and there's no sensible reason that perfectly good pies and pot noodle should be infiltrated by little round green styrofoam beads in the name of peas. An exception was New Orleans. Holy sweet mother of Jambalaya, anything and everything she met down there, she'd happily put in her mouth for the rest of her life. Including the much-feared iced tea, which was so strong and sweet that with a splash of milk (who cares what the locals say) it was just a cold builder's brew.

**19. She doesn't like lingerie. **

It's itchy, the little straps never go where the little straps are supposed to go, it rides up in all the wrong places, it bunches, rolls, and otherwise refuses to look anything like in pornos or catalogs, it's expensive as shit, impossible to clean reliably, and considering the purpose ridiculously difficult to get in or more importantly _out _of. She owns a corset and a pair of black lace panties because Artie got them for his stag and she wore them once and he kind of liked it, though not enough to be worth doing again. What makes her feel a lot sexier is a pair of nice-but-normal panties with no bra and a t-shirt that's been washed and worn until it's as soft as a sigh and so thin you can make out her nipples through it, the neck stretched out and torn a little, with a couple other small holes or tears just big enough to catch a glimpse of flesh. It's comfortable, it teases at her body enough to make Artie incoherent when she wants to work it, and most importantly, she doesn't feel a damned bit of guilt if she winds up getting it shredded off of her or soaked in sweat and splattered in cum...and isn't that what sex clothes are supposed to be for?

**20. She is starting to avoid Hogwarts because of Colin. **

It's not the grief over his death. That's still there, a dull ache in the back of her throat like the way the socket aches with the barometer suddenly shifts, but it's not enough to really make a difference any more. It's not any form of blame, which at least with him, she never had anyway. It's not the awkwardness that they used to date, kiss, fuck sometimes, that he has licked the stretch marks on her inner thighs and she knows that his balls were ticklish. It's that he's not getting older. He's still sixteen, caught transparent silver in the pajama pants and bare feet and messy hair and bloody shirt and moment he died in. He started a joke when she turned twenty that he was zombie Peter Pan and she was the Wendy Lady. He's called her that ever since, but it's getting a little more keen-edged and cutting a little deeper every time. He's so young. So horribly, terribly young. They were. She was. Half her age now, and there was a reason, in the end, that after she married and had children and a life and moved on and left the nursery, Wendy Lady did not go back to Neverland. They say all children, except one, grow up.


End file.
